Category: Blogs

Royal Roads University: A Canadian University Without Tenure or Senate

One way in which Canada is a big outlier in global higher education is the lack of standardization of university forms. Most countries have national or sub-national framework legislation that apply to all institutions’ operation and governance. Not Canada. Our provinces tend to prefer creating new bespoke legislation for every new institution that comes along. On the one hand, this leads to a pretty chaotic system. On the other: well, some time you get some pretty interesting experiments. One of the most interesting examples of

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Report Back on the National Defence Research Roundtable

You may recall that back in mid-November – on the back of some discussions that took place at the University Vice-President’s Network meeting in Victoria – HESA launched a call for a meeting in Ottawa focused on: i) how to coordinate and advance defence research in Canada, and ii) developing sector-wide advice on how Canada should structure future defence and security research investments. On December 15th, 77 people showed up in Ottawa to discuss exactly that.  Today, we are releasing National Defence Research

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How Canada Discusses Post-Secondary Education

We have an exciting little announcement for our BC and ON subscribers today – see the bottom of this blog for more details on ways we are supporting discussions and convening in the Canadian PSE sector. One of the things that distinguishes Canadian post-secondary education from those in other anglophone countries is – for lack of a better term – the difficulties we have in sustaining a national discourse on the sector. This matters a lot, I think. A lack

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Three

Just before Christmas, an interesting blog post appeared on the Canadian conservative website The Hub. It was by Mitch Davidson, late of the Ford Administration in Queen’s Park, and his subject was the topic of three-year bachelor’s degrees. Davidson is pro-, and he advances some fairly spectacular claims on behalf of such credentials. Just look at the headline: How Switching to three-year post-secondary degrees could kickstart the Canadian economy, or the claim later down in the paper that “widespread adoption

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Focus Friday: January 9

Hi everyone, Tiffany here. A quick reminder that Focus Friday is happening today (January 9th) from 12:30-1:30pm Eastern. This week’s session is a little different. Rather than a guest presentation, we’re hosting a community conversation about what 2026 might hold for the higher education sector and how institutions are thinking about the year ahead. We’ll use the hour to reflect together on the big questions many of us are already grappling with: AI will almost certainly be part of that

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